VietNamNet Bridge – The oil rig explosion in Mexico Gulf which cost BP Group tens billion dollar has worried Vietnamese environmentalists. Questions have been raised of what Vietnam will do if this happens in Vietnam and what the capability of Vietnam to cope with such disasters is.

The risk of the oil and gas eruption causing an explosion is under constant watch during the oil and gas exploitation. Statistics show the high probability of such dangerous cases in the world. On average, 3-3.5 cases occur per every 1000 oil wells. In Vietnam, according to Nguyen Van Khuong, Deputy Head of the Searching and Exploitation Division of PetroVietnam, said that the probability rate is three thousandth.

In 1993, an accident occurred at Actinia oil well of Lan Tay field which was developed by BP. The volume of gas leaking into the environment reached 0.5 billion cubic metre per day, which made a large sea area of 1000 square metres boil. Fortunately, the column of gas then weakened gradually and was extinguished within one week. It was also fortunate that the contractors and PetroVietnam dealt with the accident well, and no explosion occurred.

Experts said that since the incident occurred in a gas field, the impacts on the environment were not too serious. In any case, this also forced the contractors to spend six million dollar to deal with the consequences.

More recently, in 2009, another incident, a smaller one this time, took place at Dai Hung oil field.

Currently, Vietnam has 1000 operational oil and gas fields. It is expected that the number of oil wells under exploitation will increase significantly in the next four years, when PetroVietnam and its partners put 12 more fields into operation.

Experts have pointed out that it is very difficult and costly to deal with oil and gas eruption and oil rig explosion. Therefore, the most important thing that needs to be done is to prevent accidents from occuring. They said that it is necessary to build up a perfect legal framework which specifies safety regulations in exploitation and it is necessary to take regular inspection tours to prevent disasters from happening.

However, the current framework shows so many problems that government agencies do not understand what their functions are about. The safety regulations in oil and gas exploitation are stipulated in different laws, including the Oil and Gas Law, Labour Code, the Law on Environment Protection, and the Law on Fire Prevention and Fighting. However, officials from government agencies still do not know if they have the responsibility of inspecting oil and gas companies’ safety measures.

“I represent the state management agency. But I never have to take inspection tours to oil and gas firms,” an official said.

Do Van Hau, Deputy General Director of PetroVietnam, said that PetroVietnam has been assigned by the State the inspection of safety measures and the economic group has been doing this based on international standards.

However, he said, PetroVietnam is just an enterprise, while state management agencies should take this responsibility. “I think that it is necessary to amend the current laws and stipulate that state management agencies must take the responsibility for inspecting safety measures,” he stressed.

BP had to use a huge workforce and a lot of modern equipments to deal with the disaster in Mexico Gulf. And questoins have been raised about what Vietnam will do if such a similar case happens here and the country does not have money and modern equipments. Experts think that in this case, procedures need to be simplified in order to allow the import of necessary equipments as quickly as possible to deal with the problems in time.

Source: Thoi bao Kinh te Saigon